Public Sector AI Procurement

Governments around the world are integrating AI tooling into their workflows and processes while simultaneously developing the guidelines and strategies to capture the benefits and minimise the risks.

This talk outlines the first qualitative empirical research project into AI procurement in an Australian jurisdiction. The research highlighted the complexities of generating benefit with AI, the peculiarities of its treatment as a new type of information technology, and its connection to existing public-private power dynamics that frame the ongoing digitalisation of government. Interviews with senior bureaucrats and software vendors revealed a procurement context replete with vague and undefinable efficiency narratives, unhelpful procurement rules, insurmountable power asymmetries in software markets, and check-box style compliance approaches that obscure how AI systems alter the political texture of public sector work.

Jake Goldenfein is a law and technology scholar at Melbourne Law School and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Prior to his appointment at MLS he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University. Jake studies data governance, how law constructs data economies and dataset markets, as well as AI governance in the public sector.

To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=109827.